Tired all the time: can new research on fatigue help clinicians? (Harvey&Wessely, 09)

[Sean]

From the article:

Most will now accept that a multifactorial model of predisposing, triggering, and maintaining factors is most likely.

Most? What evidence is there for that? Certainly most of his like minded colleagues, but beyond that small ideological circle how does he know?

And I see his does his usual trick of casually mixing CFS and chronic fatigue together.

He also claims that "we know" that predisposing factors include:

previously suffering from a psychiatric disorder,...

and cites references (19-21).

But that seems to contradict his previous reference (18) that says:

Premorbid psychological distress in either the mother or the child did not predict the illness.

(And what about the Dubbo study, not cited in this paper, that found the only significant predictor of long term outcome to be initial severity of the disease at onset?)

A discrepancy he neither acknowledges nor attempts to explain.